Stocks Just Had Their Worst Day in a Month

Brent oil shot to its highest price since May after increased fighting in the Middle East on Thursday threatened to slow the global flow of crude. Sharp drops for Alphabet and Tesla, meanwhile, yanked the US stock market to its worst loss in a month.

• The S&P 500 fell 90.66 points, or 1.2%, to 7,408.30.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 506.93 points, or 1%, to 51,711.65.
• The Nasdaq composite fell 553.21 points, or 2.2%, to 25,137.69.

Stocks fell under the pressure of rising oil prices, which raise costs for businesses and erode their customers' ability to spend, the AP reports. The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, jumped 7% to settle at $100.69.

One of the heaviest weights on the market was Tesla, which tumbled 14.5% after Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company reported a weaker profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Because it's one of the largest stocks in the S&P 500 by market value, its stock has more influence on the index than nearly every other.

• One of the few that's larger is Alphabet, and its stock fell 6.9% even though the parent company of Google delivered stronger profit and revenue than analysts expected. Investors seemed to focus instead on how much Alphabet said it's set to spend on artificial-intelligence investments. Alphabet raised its forecast for capital spending over the full year after its investments last quarter doubled to nearly $45 billion from a year earlier. CEO Sundar Pichai said AI helped its cloud revenue growth accelerate to 82% last quarter, but unease nevertheless remains about whether all the money going into AI will pay off in terms of productivity and profits.
• SpaceX, another Musk company, rose 2.6% after falling more than 5% on Wednesday. The stock's price, and Musk's net worth, is still down around 50% from its peak.

The price of Brent crude touched $102 during the day, the highest price since May for the most actively traded Brent contract in the market. The cause: attacks on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. That threatens another avenue that oil companies use to move their crude from the Middle East to customers worldwide, along with the Strait of Hormuz. It was just a few weeks ago that Brent had dropped below $72 per barrel, roughly back to where it was before the war, on hopes that the Strait of Hormuz would fully reopen to oil tankers.

On Wall Street, stocks of companies with big fuel bills fell to sharp losses on worries about higher expenses. American Airlines fell 8.4% even though it reported a much bigger profit for the spring than analysts expected, something that usually sends a stock's price higher. It raised airfares, which helped it offset its higher fuel prices, during the latest quarter. Southwest Airlines lost 6.2%, even though it also reported better profit and revenue than analysts expected.